Stenographic records of the meetings of the top management in the Kremlin showed that relations Khrushchev and other Soviet politician Fidel Castro were quite complicated.

When the Soviets because of strained relations between Cuba and the United States, in August 1962, switch to the "island of freedom" missiles with nuclear heads, there was a large Caribbean crisis. The world was on the brink of war. US President John F. Kennedy announced on 22 October 1962 that it is located in Cuba the Soviet nuclear weapons. Fortunately, common sense has prevailed, and intense negotiations, the two superpowers still have come to a compromise and the leadership of the USSR agreed to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. In return, Moscow received assurances that the US would not invade Cuba, as well as to dismantle the missiles in Turkey and Italy.

Restore the Soviet missiles did not like Castro, and it is well evident from the transcripts preserved among the documents of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee. In the narrow circle of staff members during the Caribbean crisis, 26 October 1962, after reading the letter that the Soviets responded Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader said:

"It's a strange man Castro. Last night we sent a proposal to start a nuclear war and will in November be an attack on Cuba ..."

Before the audience, Khrushchev asked the question:

"What is this madness or a lack of common sense? I read a report of the Ministry of Defence that says no flights over Cuba. It is obvious that my statement the President of the United States are honored. In a word, we finished the operation and the goal we have set is reached . we pulled from the statement that America would not attack Cuba and would restrain others that they do not do. "

"Preaching" Che Guevara MOSCOW

It is interesting that the Ernesto Che Guevara in November 1964 during a visit to Moscow "gave a lecture on" the new Soviet leadership about the merits of Khrushchev. The archives preserved telegram Soviet ambassador Alexeyeva, who wrote that in October 1964, Che Guevara talked about how he knows that in the USSR there are people who are not enthusiastic when it comes to the Cuban Revolution, "Cuba is not only an economic burden for the USSR but also a potential flashpoint nuclear war. "

Although it has not publicly declared, Castro was angry with the Soviet leadership. Considerably more experienced Khrushchev was not offended, but he tried to explain to him that it must be wiser and more pragmatic.

Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who has twenty years of living in America, where he went as a university professor, said that his father Kastro resembled his revolutionary youth, while assessing that in many respects Fidel still immature.

- My father believed that Castro still do not understand some things related to real politics. Therefore, during the Caribbean crisis treated Castro with some caution, because it is believed that Fidel can i button is pressed. The Castro's temperament was the reason they were quickly withdrawn missiles from Cuba - recalls Sergei Khrushchev.

Khrushchev immediately after the revolution did not consider Cuba a friendly country. But when Castro said he would join the Soviet bloc, emerged in the conditions for which the Soviet Union "had to" protect Cuba.

- Although his video shortcomings, my father admired Castro as the leader of a country that opposed our common enemy - says Sergei Khrushchev.

Castro anger due to the withdrawal of missiles lasted only a few months ago. In April 1963, he spent a month in the USSR. The journey began from the north, because in Severodvinsk wanted to see the Soviet atomic submarines. Except in Moscow, Fidel Castro visited and the Asiatic Soviet republics. Khrushchev tried to explain it, except that opposes America, must develop the economy, agriculture, fishing, industry and energy. As far as education and medicine, Cuba has indeed become an example in South America.

Many years later, when writing the biographical book "My Life", Castro was raised a question: Are you in a moment counted on to that your security was guaranteed by the military potential of the USSR? He replied briefly: "Never!"

- We are at a certain moment become convinced that in the case of a direct US attack on Cuba, the Soviet people would never go to war for us. We could not ask it for them. In this development of modern technology, it would be naive to expect that the Soviet Union go to war against the United States if they go on, the island located only 90 miles from American territory. In addition, we are directly fed the Soviet people a few years before the collapse of the USSR, tell us plainly, will you help us? They responded to us: "Do not." We know that and we will also respond. And after that we more intensively to develop its defense concept - said Castro.

Bottom line, USA gov was freindly with Batista, this guy was not a nice fella.Agreed Castro left a lake of blood in his wake and continued domination, my brother was on red alert headed for Cuba before JFK calmed the waters.The bay of pigs was destined to fail, the agency had a case of the arse for JFK when he refused military backup for the agencys crew. The office, as the agency was refered to in those days were hiring slobs of the streets of Miami.I feel kennedy was in peices that he allowed the agency this clustermuch, I am sure the agency didn't anticapate 100% JFK wouldn't allow a military invasion and what could have been a WWIII or reastablished at minimum a mafia rule.In short, the CIA and their DONS were a tad pizzed off.

Bottom line, USA gov was freindly with Batista, this guy was not a nice fella.Agreed Castro left a lake of blood in his wake and continued domination, my brother was on red alert headed for Cuba before JFK calmed the waters.The bay of pigs was destined to fail, the agency had a case of the arse for JFK when he refused military backup for the agencys crew. The office, as the agency was refered to in those days were hiring slobs of the streets of Miami.I feel kennedy was in peices that he allowed the agency this clustermuch, I am sure the agency didn't anticapate 100% JFK wouldn't allow a military invasion and what could have been a WWIII or reastablished at minimum a mafia rule.In short, the CIA and their DONS were a tad pizzed off.

I do not know did you watch TV series "Company". In the scene of "Bay o Pigs", director of that CIA operation did not asked the Supreme Commander - JFK. An experienced agent (М. Keaton played that role ) says in advance that this is the dumbest operation will fail, because the whole world will know that behind Cuban emigrants stands USA.Even worse, that the operation would not collapsed if should be engaged US Army. Then will be act of military aggression against a sovereign country. Some superior to heard or said other agents that the Army will help the Cuban immigrants and to continue as planned.

... Nespral is not eager to let the harm Castro inflicted on Cuban citizens fall by the wayside.

"At what price? At what price when you have thousands of people killed in firing squads, and thousands of families that were separated?" she says. "I think that objectively speaking he did a lot of harm. So much pain and suffering to the Cuban people that I cannot see him in a positive light at all."

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Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton mocked the anti-Castro sentiment of Miami Cubans and their influence on the political process, according to newly released State Department emails.

On December 16, 2009, State Department legislative affairs staffer Richard Verma emailed Secretary of State Clinton to update her on the status of the Obama administration’s pick for ambassador to Brazil. Their pick Tom Shannon was being blocked at the time by then-Republican Florida Sen. George LeMieux, who viewed Shannon as being weak on Cuba’s Castro regime.

LeMieux was reportedly backing Charlie Crist against his tea party primary opponent Marco Rubio in a race that heavily prioritized Florida’s Cuban vote.

“What took them so long? Did you promise your first born?” Clinton asked.

“Yes, I sold my soul to George Lemieux today. I am not proud of it,” Verma replied.

“Does this mean you have to go to Cuba and arrest Castro or just shovel more $ into Little Havana?” Clinton asked Verma, referring to the politically powerful Cuban-American neighborhood in Miami.

“I suspect they would prefer more $ for Little Havana,” Verma said.

President Obama announced Wednesday that the U.S. will open an embassy in Havana, and Cuba will have an embassy in Washington, D.C.

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

This is the third volume of the Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation and it focuses on theproblems of establishing a policy for the United States Government as Fidel Castro and his cohortscame to power in Cuba.* . The policy decided on by the US Government in March 1960 called for the displacementof Fidel Castro, and it was by no means a unilateral decision promoted by the Central IntelligenceAgency -- althou~h it is demonstrable that the Agency was far more perceptive than the policy making bodiesin recognizing the threat to the Western Hemisphere posed by Castro's communist affiliation. Because thepolicy makers feared censure by the United Nations and/or the Organization of American States, the mythof ··pla.usible deniability" was the caveat that determined the CIA would be the principal implementing arm forthe anti-Castro effort.

...Particular attention is focused on the roles played ~ both President Eisenhower who authorized the anti-castro program and Vice President Nixon who has been charged time and again --.unjustifiably as the record reveals -- with being the mastermind behind the operation....

The CIA's Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair Lessons UnlearnedMichael Warner

The Bay of Pigs invasion met its ignominious end on the afternoon of 19 April 1961. Three days after the force of Cuban émigrés had hit the beach, the CIA officers who planned the assault gathered around a radio in their Washington war room while the Cuban Brigade's commander transmitted his last signal. He had been pleading all day for supplies and air cover, but nothing could be done for him and his men. Now he could see Fidel Castro's tanks approaching. "I have nothing left to fight with," he shouted. "Am taking to the woods. I can't wait for you." Then the radio went dead, leaving the drained and horrified CIA men holding back nausea. 1

Within days the postmortems began. President Kennedy assigned Gen. Maxwell Taylor to head the main inquiry into the government's handling of the operation. 2 Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles asked the CIA's Inspector General (IG), Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, Jr., to conduct an internal audit. A humiliated President Kennedy did not wait for either report before cleaning house at CIA. He accepted resignations from both Dulles and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell (although both stayed at their posts until their successors were selected a few months later).....

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Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

Mourned Castro. Not his sister, Juanita, will attend the funeral of his brother: "He has turned the island into a prison surrounded by water The vast majority". But, some in France more sense of brotherhood towards Fidel sisters that jailer.

Before we try to explain the unexplainable, here's a quick reminder of reality reduced. Castro was not the only South American dictator. He was also a butcher, specialist in rapping. He was not satisfied torture and eliminating their opponents, traded their blood, such as "Wall Street Journal" pointed out in an article 12/30. 2005: 5/27. 1966, 3.5 liters of blood per person is medically they produced some of the 166 prisoners on the personal orders of Fidel Castro's communist Vietnam and sold at a price of $ 100 per liter. After blood tests, 866 convicts in the state of cerebral anemia, paralyzed and unconscious, were taken on a stretcher and killed.

Miguel A. Faria in the book "Cuba, a revolution" writes on page 415: "Ever since Fidel Castro took control of the island in 1959, the most reliable estimates amounts to between 30,000 and 40,000 people were killed or salvo in Cuban prisons."

From the first days of the revolution, Castro ordered summary executions in order to establish a "culture of fear," which is quickly destroyed any resistance. Lounge revolutionaries in France who supported him kindly forgive his violence, while at the same time usually curse the death penalty that is applied over the killers of the general criminal law. Dismissed silent about that in the coming decades Kastro ensure obedience of their people by extending the state of terror...

Morgan was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to Alexander Morgan and German-American Loretta Morgan (née Ruderth).[2] Raised in an affluent Toledo neighborhood, he dropped out of high school and was often in trouble with the law.[3]

Morgan joined the army after World War II and married Darlene Edgerton in 1946. The marriage was annulled after a year and a half. He was stationed with Company B, 35th Infantry, in Japan, where he fathered a son with a German-Japanese hostess named Setsuko Takeda. He was court-martialed in 1948.[2]

He is said to have been skilled with firearms and was rumored to have been a Central Intelligence Agency operative, though there are no public records or witness interviews to support the claim.[3] After his discharge from the Army, Morgan apparently also worked for a local crime syndicate....

Cuban Revolution

Opposed to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Morgan abandoned his wife and children and went to Cuba in 1957, joining a guerrilla force of the Second National Front of the Escambray (Segundo Frente Nacional de Escambray or SFNE)[2] that operated against Batista's soldiers in the Escambray Mountains in central Cuba.[3]

After distinguishing himself in a series of battles, he was promoted to the rank of comandante, leading his own column. In 1958, he wrote a statement that appeared in the New York Times to explain his participation in Castro's revolution, "Why I Am Here". It said in part:[4]

I am here because I believe that the most important thing for free men to do is to protect the freedom of others. I am here so that my son, when he is grown, will not have to fight or die in a land not his own, because one man or group of men try to take his liberty from him. I am here because I believe that free men should take up arms and stand together and fight and destroy the groups and forces that want to take the rights of people away.

In December 1958, Che Guevara joined forces with Morgan's group and the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil guerrillas of the Escambray mountains. Together they captured the city of Santa Clara on December 31. Twelve hours later, Batista fled Cuba. Morgan and his men occupied the city of Cienfuegos on January 1–2, 1959.[5]

In January 1959, he told a reporter that "all I'm interested in is settling down to a nice peaceful existence" but worried how U.S. authorities would respond to his military activities in Cuba. In March 1959, officials of the U.S. embassy in Havana warned Americans that participation in foreign military service could jeopardize their citizenship.[4]...

Morgan married a Cuban, Olga María Rodríguez Farinas, who was also a revolutionary, and together they had two daughters.[3]

Throughout the struggle against Batista, Morgan was vocal about Castro's supposed anti-communist beliefs. When asked during interviews about Castro's political beliefs and where the new Cuban government was leaning, he remained firm in his belief that Castro was not a communist and that Cuba would become a capitalist parliamentary democracy.

...[ now just a note that at some point in this period it became obvious that Castro was a communist and Eisenhower and Dulles began the ANTI-Castro program .... as an American useful idiot , Morgan was not long for this world .... ]

Morgan was arrested in October 1960 and charged with plotting to join and lead the counter-revolutionaries who were active in the Escambray Mountains. On March 11, 1961, shortly after a military trial at La Cabana prison, Morgan, then 32 years old, was shot by firing squad.[2]

William Morgan was an American who became a leader in Fidel Castro’s army — only to be executed as a traitor after the revolution. More than 40 years on, his widow is fighting to clear his name. By Christopher Goodwin

Nowhere could seem further from the balmy subtropics of Havana, Cuba, than the bleak, wintry snowscapes of Toledo, Ohio. But every day for the last 45 years, the 69-year-old Toledo housewife and grandmother Olga Goodwin has forced herself to think about a dusty corner in Havana’s Colon cemetery. There, in an unmarked grave, lies the body of William Alexander Morgan, Olga’s first husband, an American who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution but was later executed as a traitor by the Cuban dictator.“William died without a country,” says Olga, a small, nervous but passionate Cuban woman whose English is still very fractured. Sitting in her lawyer’s office in Toledo, Olga Goodwin (no relation to the writer) fights back tears as she describes her quixotic fight to have her ex-husband’s remains returned to the United States and to have his US citizenship restored. Morgan was stripped of his citizenship for fighting in Castro’s army. “He was American but he wanted freedom for my country,” says Olga, who escaped to the US in 1980 after spending 12 years in Cuban jails, and has since remarried. “I cannot find peace until William can come home to his country.”

The story of the mysterious life and death of William Morgan is one of the last untold stories of the Cuban revolution. It has been pieced together by The Sunday Times from interviews with his widow and others, from contemporary accounts, and from previously classified CIA, FBI and State Department documents. It is the improbable story of how a high-school dropout from Ohio, an ex-con, a ranch hand, gambling enforcer, mafia- gunrunner and circus fire-eater, became one of the top leaders in Castro’s revolutionary army, only to be executed as a traitor after the revolution...

Morgan went to Cuba around the end of 1957. He wanted to fight against Batista because one of his closest friends, Jack Turner, also a gunrunner, had been executed by Batista’s forces in 1957. By March 1958, Morgan had found his way into the Escambray mountains. Although some guerrillas mistrusted this “gringo” and thought he might be a CIA plant, he won respect for his courage in battle. Today, many people forget that the rebels fighting Batista were not a single, cohesive army, but a loose federation, with widely divergent political views. The Second Front, led by 25-year-old Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, was avowedly anti-communist. There were communists fighting against Batista, such as “Che” Guevara, and many of those fighting with him and Castro in the 26th of July Movement, but at that stage, most historians believe, even Castro was not a convinced communist.

In the summer of 1958, Guevara and some 200 fighters from the 26th of July Movement appeared in the Escambray intending to take control of the Second Front. But Morgan stood up to Guevara and his men, and sent them packing.

The daughter of poor tobacco workers, Olga Rodriguez Farinas was a bold, idealistic college student in the late 1950s when she boarded a bus to join rebel fighters in the mountains. Among her tasks: interviewing men who walked into camp eager to join the movement against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencia Batista, who became rich by turning Havana into a gambler’s playground run by American mobsters.

In 1958, she was swept off her feet by the dashing Morgan. A few months earlier, he’d joined the guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains, finally finding a fit in a troubled life.

Growing up in a stable, Catholic family in the Old West End, Morgan was likable, itchy, and often bored. He was kicked out of three Toledo high schools and couldn’t hold a job. After he was dishonorably discharged from the Army in Japan (where a Japanese woman bore him a son), he spent a few years in prison.

As a fire eater at a Florida circus, he married the snake charmer with whom he had two children. They later divorced, but not before he discovered that he’d make bigger bucks running Cuba-bound guns for the mob. He’d been inspired by young Cubans who spoke passionately about overthrowing the dictator who fed the rich and starved the poor.

He was ill-prepared for rebel life. He didn’t speak Spanish, was overweight, and struggled with the heat. But in battle, he was action-figure brave and had good instincts.Morgan and Olga married five months after they met, and their 2½ years together would bring two daughters, exhilaration, danger, and death....

“Other than his mother, Morgan had never been with a woman like Olga. Never. Once he saw the atrocities and the people who were tortured and beaten by Batista’s soldiers, he understood why Olga threw herself into the cause,” Sallah said.

At 78, the dimuitive Olga Goodwin lives in an old townhouse off Alexis Road with James Goodwin, a retired welder and her husband of 32 years, and her 23-year-old grandson Tony Negrin.

It’s a quiet life.

Goodwin wears the damage of more than a decade of brutal imprisonment. She was often in pitch-black solitary confinement for organizing other prisoners, women who also had worked against the communists.

A stinking hole in the floor was a toilet. Sometimes she got just a cup of water with which to wash.

Torture was frequent, medical attention was absent. A blow to the side of her face with a rubber club destroyed part of her vision; a knife to her stomach is forever a scar. She walks bent to one side, the result, she figures, from years of foul prison air, terrible food, and drubbings.

How did she maintain a semblance of sanity?

“We prayed a lot,” she says, smoking a menthol cigarette at her kitchen table.

Seldom able to see her children and relatives, her prison mates became family; when they despaired, racked with hunger, she told them to imagine angels bringing them sugar.

She suffered worse treatment than most, said Isabel Rodriguez, who served nine years for her own anti-communist efforts. She was a young, English-speaking physician when she met right-off-the-boat Morgan in Havana, and later, Olga.

Living in Miami, Rodriguez, 87, is retired from general practice medicine and gynecology. She and Goodwin keep in touch and have often visited. Prison, said Rodriguez, changes a person utterly. Her faith in the goodness of Cubans was shattered by the communist militia’s cruelties.Goodwin weighed 79 pounds when she was freed. She eventually received a treasure: a long, sentimental letter Morgan had penned to her shortly before his death 10 years earlier:

“When I found you, I found everything that I wished for in the world … I have written my mother and I have asked that you all take care of each other.”...

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Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

1961JFK waits for word on the Bay of Pigs invasionShare this:facebooktwittergoogle+PRINT CITEPresident John F. Kennedy waits for word on the success of a covert plan to overthrow Cuba’s government on this day in 1961. Kennedy had authorized Operation Zapata, the attempt to overthrow Cuba’s communist leader, Fidel Castro, on April 15. The failed coup became what many have called the worst foreign-policy decision of Kennedy’s administration.

When Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, he inherited from his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, an ongoing conflict with the leftist regime in Cuba. Aided by Soviet-bloc weaponry, Castro led a brutal clampdown on human rights and dissent after taking power in 1959. That same year, Eisenhower had implemented a trade embargo on Cuban goods and, in 1960, broke off diplomatic relations with the island nation. Before he left office, Eisenhower had approved, but did not launch, a covert plan devised by his vice president, Richard Nixon, and the CIA to overthrow Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro. When Kennedy assumed the presidency, he retained Eisenhower’s CIA and military advisors who had helped plan the mission. At their urging, Kennedy made the final decision to send approximately 1,200 CIA-trained Cuban exiles to land at the bay on Cuba’s southern coast called Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). The attempted coup failed miserably, largely due to faulty intelligence. Kennedy and the CIA leaders in charge of the mission (all inherited from Eisenhower) believed that Cuba’s people and its military would spontaneously rise up to help the exile army overthrow Castro, a grave miscalculation. Instead, Castro’s forces captured most of the exile army, executed some and held the rest prisoner until private American groups raised funds for their ransom.

The CIA and JFK’s administration blamed each other for the plan’s failure. The CIA cited JFK’s failure to order prolonged offensive air strikes against Cuba’s air force at the same time as the land operation, while JFK and his advisors blamed the CIA for keeping information from the president, including several analysts’ conclusions that the plan’s success was dubious. The ensuing tension between the president and his military and intelligence advisors prompted JFK to rely even more heavily on the advice of his brother, Robert F. Bobby Kennedy, who was also his attorney general, when making future foreign-policy decisions.

A former special assistant to JFK, Arthur Schlesinger, has since recorded Bobby Kennedy’s recollections of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In a memorandum written in June 1961, Bobby Kennedy concluded that the mission broke down from the incompetency of the CIA and a complete lack of communication. He also noticed that the disaster weighed heavily on his brother, who was concerned about how it would reflect upon his leadership and the nation’s credibility. In an oral history interview, Bobby Kennedy recounted that he and his brother had been through a lot of things together, and he was more upset [by the Bay of Pigs failure] than any other.

... Nespral is not eager to let the harm Castro inflicted on Cuban citizens fall by the wayside.

"At what price? At what price when you have thousands of people killed in firing squads, and thousands of families that were separated?" she says. "I think that objectively speaking he did a lot of harm. So much pain and suffering to the Cuban people that I cannot see him in a positive light at all."

This reason created opposition, as gross as they became, this was the motive, the revolution & removal of the sucklings, leading to the placement of Castro. Too bad the USA Gov lackeys backed Batista, had they refused dealing with this shitbag we could have had a freindship with the Island rather than what became a USSR suckling despot.

The gaming industry, prostitution and the drug trade in the U.S. mainland also had their sights on Cuba. The mafia managed to expand their operations to Cuba to avoid harassment from the U.S. government. Cuba was to be their base of operations as they were looking to expand into other Caribbean nations. During that time, e a cesspool of cCuba was under the leadership of President Fulgencio Batista who had close political ties to Washington and its multinational corporations. Batista was also a good friend to organized crime. Cuba becamorruption, illegal drugs and prostitution which became a playground (metaphorically speaking) for the rich and famous while the majority of ordinary Cubans lived in extreme poverty. This is an historical account of Cuba before 1959, a time period that explains why Cuba’s Revolution was a long time in the making.

Chis- You don't seem to understand that Dulles/Eisenhower were seeking to replace Batista with Castro which backfired when Castro went full totalitarian "communist" . All early support for Castro came from the CIA. Batista was becoming to difficult to deal with by the United Fruit Company. How do you justify the murder, torture and imprisonent of people who fought for the liberation of the country, unless you are a communist.

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Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

Hi T. I agree Castro's regime was cold blooded, merciless, etc. No beef with your post at all. I was trying to emphasize the reasoning as to why Ike didn't shut down Batista, Ive been down this road before, the historical evidence is convoluted. He may not have been pleased with Batista's BS, but he didn't do much about it, it gets a tad sketchy...Some report, no source-no time, though I remember Castro was a nationalist prior to his commie sell out, it has been said, please correct me if I am wrong, he would have welcomed USA intervention and outing of Batista. All I'm driving at, Castros regime crimes asside, Ike should have jumped on the Batista dictatorship before Castro went communist, he didn't.Again please correct me if I'm wrong, didnt Eisenhower & the agency leave the Bay of Pigs plan,all set up ,in JFK's lap. I'm not a communist, Im a cynic..Yes T, I agree C commited crimes against humanity..

Please look at the previous posts ie understand that Dulles/Eisenhower were seeking to replace Batista with Castro which backfired ie blowback ... The USA would not go to war with Batista directly.

This is well documented ... Dulles had his own ulterior globalist motives and may have inserted communists into the liberation as part of the globalist goals . I don't know ... But I am sure he told Ike he wanted to bring democracy to Cuba ....

earlier:

In the 1950's, Illuminati bankers David Rockefeller and Eugene Meyer organized a Cuban partnership, called the Moa Bay Mining Co.

As his appartchiks, Rockefeller hired the three stooges of the Caribbean, namely Fidel Castro, E. Howard Hunt and George H.W. Bush.

plus:

Rockefeller's Citi-Bank provided the financial support that Fidel Castro needed for his ouster of Batista, and that Rockefeller had profited immensely from Castro's fictitious "expropriation" of Moa Bay mining fields.

Castro received his training in the arts of economic terrorism and guerrilla warfare from US Army Special Forces, Col. William A. Morgan of Ohio. Rockefeller maintained actual physical control of all of "Castro's" oil and mining operations. Meanwhile he collected extravagant profits from endless "Pentagon bailouts" by the U.S. taxpayer. -

In 1957, Pedro Díaz Lanz joined Fidel Castro's rebel group in Santiago, Cuba. He was employed as a commercial pilot with the airline Aerovías Q. He later acted as head of the Revolutionary Air Force, and during 1958 he smuggled weapons and ammunition from Costa Rica and Florida into Cuba by air.[1]

After the Cuban Revolution on 1 January 1959, he was confirmed as head of the new Revolutionary Air Force as well as Castro's personal pilot. Within months, he became vocal about his opposition to the influence of communists on the new revolutionary government. On 29 June 1959, Fidel Castro relieved him of his post, and he left immediately by boat for Florida with his second wife and 3 of his six children, and reportedly with Frank Sturgis, a fellow anti-communist.[2]

...

Díaz committed suicide with a gunshot wound to the chest in 2008 at the age of 81 after years of poverty and depression

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Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

Cuban officials, under diplomatic cover in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, brutally tortured and killed American POWs whom they beat senseless in a research program "sanctioned by the North Vietnamese."(1) This was dubbed the "Cuba Program" by the Department of Defense (DOD) and the CIA, and it involved 19 American POWs (some reposts state 20). Recent declassified secret CIA and DOD intelligence documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveal the extent of Cuba's involvement with American POWs captured in Vietnam. A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report states that "The objective of the interrogators was to obtain the total submission of the prisoners..."(2)

According to former POW Air Force Colonel Donald "Digger" Odell, "two POWs left behind in the camp were 'broken' but alive when he and other prisoners were released [1973 Operation Homecoming]. ... They were too severely tortured by Cuban interrogators" to be released. The Vietnamese didn't want the world to see what they had done to them."(3)

POWs released during "Operation Homecoming" in 1973 "were told not to talk about third-country interrogations. .... This thing is very sensitive with all kinds of diplomatic ramifications."(4) Hence, the torture and murder of American POWs by the Cubans was swept under the rug by the U.S. Government.

The "Cuban Program"

The "Cuban Program" was initiated around August 1967 at the Cu Loc POW camp known as "The Zoo", a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. The American POWs gave their Cuban torturers the names "Fidel," "Chico," "Pancho" and "Garcia." The Vietnamese camp commander was given the name "The Lump" because of a fatty tumor growth in the middle of his forehead.

Intelligence and debriefing reports reveal that testing "torture methods were of primary interest" of the "Cuban Program." The Cuban leader of the "Cuban Program" ["Fidel"] was described in debriefing reports as "a professional interrogator," and a second team member was described as looking like a Czech ["Chico"]. "The Cubans has (sic) the authority to order NVNS [North Vietnamese] to torture American PWs [POWs]." The Vietnamese "catered" to the Cubans.(5)

________________

*Research conducted for the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Missing Servicemen by Board Member and former Vietnam POW Mike Benge.

According to a 20 January 1976 deposition, Marge Van Beck of DIA/DI, Resources and Installation Division, MIA/PW Branch, states that she was told by the "Air Force that the CIA had identified FIDEL."(6) Since the CIA and the FBI has not released all documentation relevant to the "Cuban Program", there were no copies of any photographs accompanying the Defense Department's September 11, 1996, report to Congress, Cuban Program Information.(5)

Several other documents corroborate that the CIA analysts identified two Cuban military attaches, Eduardo Morjon Esteves and Luis Perez Jaen, who had backgrounds that seemed to correspond with information on "Fidel" and "Chico" supplied by returning POWs.(7) Reportedly, in 1977-78, Esteves served under diplomatic cover as a brigadier general at the United Nations in New York and no attempt was made to either arrest or expel him.(

However, unless the Cubans were overconfident, it is highly unlikely that those who participated in the "Cuban Program" would have used their actual names when they went to Vietnam, since it is standard practice in undercover operations to use new identities. According to an expert on Cuba, "Fidel's" profile fits that of Cuban Dr. Miguel Angel Bustamente-O'Leary, President of the Cuban Medical Association. [DPMO's compilation lists a Professor Jose Bustamante, who was the president of the Pan-American Medical Confederation.] Dr. Miguel Bustamente is said to be an expert at extracting confessions through torture and he was compared to Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengale.(9)

"Chico's" profile fits that of Major Fernando VECINO Alegret, described in two intelligence reports as being "un-Cuban in appearance makes [sic] one wonder if he was a Cuban, or a block officer (possible Czech) in Cuban uniform." "He has studied in the USSR," and "...his Spanish...does not sound like Cuban Spanish." He was active in the Rebel Youth Association (AJR) and Union of Young Communists (UYC).(5b) His background would give him a natural tie-in to the international communist youth training center and the Vietnamese interrogation center in Cuba. It would also explain the observation of and participation in the "Cuban Program" by young Vietnamese officer trainees (see below).

According to POW debriefing reports, "The Lump" told a group of POWs that the 'Cuban Program'...was a Hanoi University Psychological Study."(5c) [Also see section on Vietnamese and Soviet Bloc Research on American POWs]

The torture and murder of American POWs in Vietnam by Cubans ets an unconscionable precedent and is in direct violation of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War that the North Vietnamese communists signed.

The Beatings

"Fidel" called one of the American POWs the "Faker". However, he wasn't faking it. He was one of the three American POWs who had already been beaten senseless by "Fidel" and his cohorts.

The sight of the prisoner stunned Bomar, he stood transfixed, trying to make himself believe that human beings could so batter another human being. The man could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man's head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. He had been through much more than the day's beatings. His body was ripped and torn everywhere; "hell- cuffs" appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back and legs. Fidel smashed a fist into the man's face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man's face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. Again and again, a dozen times, smashed the man's face with the hose. He was never released.(10)

Air Force ace Major James Kasler was also tortured by "Fidel" for days on end during June 1968. "Fidel" beat Kasler across the buttocks with a large truck fan belt until "he tore my rear end to shreds." For one three-day period, Kasler was beaten with the fan belt every hour from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. and kept awake at night. "My mouth was so bruised that I could not open my teeth for five days." After one beating, Kasler's buttocks, lower back, and legs hung in shreds. The skin had been entirely whipped away and the area was a bluish, purplish, greenish mass of bloody raw meat.(11)

DPMO's Evaluation

The "Cuban Program" was evaluated by two of the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office's (DPMO) chief analysts Robert Destatte and Chuck Towbridge. In an email to Commander Chip Beck, an intelligence officer who at the time was working at DPMO, Destatte said he had concluded that the "Cuban Program" was nothing more than a program "to provide instruction in basic English to PAVN [North Vietnamese Army] personnel working with American prisoners."(12) According to Destatte, it was an English language program that had gone awry.

Destatte also has the audacity to claim that the Vietnamese were unaware of the "Cuban Program," and it was stopped once the Vietnamese found out that "Fidel" and the others were torturing the American POWs. However, the evidence that Destatte studied in compiling the report to Congress belies his assertion. It is very clear from the POWs' debriefing reports that the camp commander, "The Lump", guards and various other Vietnamese cadre were present during torture sessions.

Destatte also professes, "The Vietnamese explanation is plausible and fully consistent with what we know about the conduct of the Cubans in question..."(12) And how had Destatte reached his conclusion? Destatte asked the North Vietnamese communists, and this is what they told him! These are the very same people who broke every agreement they made with the United States, and who systematically murdered over 80,000 political prisoners after the communist takeover of South Viet Nam in 1975. A military historian once told Commander Beck not to underestimate "dumb," and Beck said Destatte would have to be brain-dead, however, to be that dumb.(13)

It is evident that DOD's analysis of the "Cuban Program" is incomplete for it did not examine the possible link to a Hanoi University research study, nor was there any investigation of Cuba's role in maintaining the Ho Chi Minh Trail where numerous American servicemen were captured. In early 1999, DPMO's chief, Bob Jones, told members of the organizations representing the families of POW/MIAs that he had proposed a meeting among Vietnam, Laos and Cambodian officials to discuss the fate of American POW/MIAs. The author, representing the National Alliance of Families, suggested that Cuba should also be invited to participate, since they were responsible for the "Cuban Program" as well as for maintaining a good share of the Ho Chi Minh Trail where many servicemen became MIA. Jones retorted that my suggestion was ridiculous for there was no evidence that the Cubans were ever involved. ["See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," author.]

Other Cuban Involvement With POWs

Documents reveal that Cubans not only tortured and killed a number of American POWs in Vietnam, but may have also taken several POWs to Cuba in the mid-1960s. The POWs, mostly pilots, were reportedly imprisoned in Las Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro's G-2 intelligence service. The source of this information reportedly was debriefed by the FBI; however, this debriefing report was not in DPMO's report to Congress, and no evidence has surfaced that there was any other follow up.(14)

According to a February 1971 State Department cable, a former aide to Fidel Castro offered "...to ransom POWs in NVN [North Viet Nam] through the Castro Government." The cable concluded, "Propose doing nothing further unless advised."(15) Evidently no advice was forthcoming, and there is no evidence of any other agency investigating this matter.

One intelligence source reportedly interviewed "Fidel", "Chico" and "Pancho" after they returned from Hanoi to Cuba and said they claimed that their real job was to act as gate-keepers to select American POWs who could aid international communism.(16)

According to a DIA "asset", Hanoi made "a political investment in all cases where prisoners [could] be ideologically turned around in order to someday serve its designs in behalf of international communism."(17) This is corroborated by several other intelligence reports. One, a CIA briefing memo, reveals that "As of September 1967 [redacted] a great deal of proselytizing of American pilots was being carried out in an effort to try to convince them to go to other communist countries as advisors. [redacted] This was disclosed during an official Party briefing [redacted]. The North Vietnamese claimed the communist countries needed the advice of American pilots to counter any attack which the U.S. might make against the communist countries."(18) This was the same time period that the "Cuban Program" was in full operation.

Those Americans targeted for selection by the communists as "advisors" for the communist countries would have been the highly-skilled pilots and electronic warfare back-seaters, skills highly prized by Soviet Bloc countries. The reported American POWs ("pilots") reported to have been held in Las Maristas prison in Cuba could have been some of these highly skilled people, who would have been prized assets for communist Cuba.

DPMO's analyst Bob Destatte wrongly concluded that the "Cuban Program" was terminated by the Vietnamese in August 1968 because of "Fidel's" excesses in torturing the American POWs. This is far from the truth, for the Vietnamese communists routinely continued to torture American POWs in other camps long after the "program" was terminated.

Besides being part of a medical study linked to the University in Hanoi, Cuba was carrying out an aggressive propaganda campaign and other subversive activities against the U.S. According to the Cuban paper El Mundo, in August 1968, Professor Miguel A. D'Estafano, who headed the Cuban Solidarity with Vietnam Committee, "prolonged his stay in the DRV to complete a program with various organizations and institutions to collect extensive information that can serve as the basis for the second symposium against genocide in Vietnam..." According to POW debriefings, a Cuban (presumably D'Estafano) showed up at the Zoo during that time and "Fidel," "Chico" and "Pancho" left with him. Their return was timed so they could prepare a presentation for the communist internationale Second Symposium Against Yankee Genocide in Vietnam held in Cuba, October 18-21, 1968.(19) There, films and tapes were shown of the research on American POWs in the "Cuban Program" that served to boost the morale of the communists that the war in Vietnam was being won.(1) [Similar to the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal "kangaroo court" and "dog and pony show" held in Denmark in July 1967.(20)]

"Fidel", "Chico" and "Pancho" weren't the only Cubans who were involved with American POWs. As part of their propaganda program, Dr. Fernando Barral, a Spanish-born psychologist, interviewed Lt. Cmdr. John Sidney McCain Jr. (now a U.S. Senator) for an article published in Cuba's house-organ Granma on January 24, 1970.(21) Barral was a card-carrying communist internationale residing in Cuba and traveling on a Cuban passport.

Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Cubans were heavily involved in the Vietnam war. Cuba had a very large contingent of combat engineers, the Giron Brigade, that was responsible for maintaining a large section of the "Ho Chi Minh Trail;" the supply line running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. The contingent was so large that Cuba had to establish a consulate in the jungle.(22)

A large number of American personnel serving in both Vietnam and Laos were either captured or killed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and in all likelihood, many by the Cubans. One National Security Agency SigNet report states that 18 American POWs "are being detained at the Phom Thong Camp..." in Laos, and "...are being closely guarded by Soviet and Cuban personnel with Vietnamese soldiers outside the camp."(23)

Cubans and Other POWs

According to CIA documents Cuban communist party committee members, Cuban "journalists" Raul Valdes Vivo and Marta Rojas Rodriguez, "visited liberated areas of South Vietnam where they interviewed [interrogated] U.S. prisoners of war being held by the Viet Cong."(24) [Many of the American POWs held in the South Viet Nam, were in fact under the command-control of the North Vietnamese's Enemy Proselytizing Bureau, but temporarily farmed-out to Viet Cong.] Rojas told of her "interviewing" American POWS in South Viet Nam at the Bertram Russel mock war crimes tribunal in Denmark in 1967.(20) Photographs of some of the POWs, and related articles, appeared in Cuban and various other communist media. American POWs Charles Crafts, Smith, McClure, Schumann and Cook were among those interviewed and photographed by Rojas and Vivo. This leads one to ask, "Why hasn't DOD pursued questioning Cubans about the fate of American POWs?"

One POW camp holding a large number of Americans was located about 100 km from the Chinese border between Monkai and Laokai, (an area where Cuban engineers were constructing military installations after 1975). According to an intelligence source, "one day the camp just disappeared, guards and all".(25) [also see End Notes]

The disappearance of American POWs near the Cuban facilities at Monkai and Laokai wasn't an isolated incident. American POWs also disappeared in the vicinity of two other Cuban installations. One American POW camp, located at "Work Site 5" (Cong Truong 5) just north of the DMZ, was adjacent to a Cuban field hospital that Fidel Castro visited in 1972. None of the POWs held in that camp were ever released, including black American aviator Lt. Clemmie McKinney. McKinney was shot down in April 1972, approximately the same time as Castro's visit. McKinney's remains were returned on August 14, 1985. The Vietnamese claim that McKinney died in November 1972; however, "A CILHI (U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii)

forensic anthropologist states his opinion as to time of death as not earlier than 1975 and probably several years later."(26) Had McKinney been a guest of the real "Fidel" to be exploited by Castro's G-2 at Las Maristas and later returned to Vietnam?

Another Cuban installation was near Ba Vi, where numerous sightings of "white buffalos" [i.e., American POWs] were made by South Vietnamese undergoing "reeducation" in the North. According to one of the recently returned Vietnamese 34-A commandos, he saw 60 American POWs at the Thanh Tri Prison complex in 1969.(27) Also in the same prison complex were approximately 100 French and Moroccan POWs captured in the early 1950s. Later the French and Moroccans were transferred to the Ba Vi Prison complex near the Cuban facility. There were a small number of American POWs held for a while in a section of the Thanh Tri Prison complex, appropriately dubbed "Skidrow". However, they numbered about 20, not 60, and none had been held with French and/or Moroccan POWs.[see End Notes]

The commando's report corroborates numerous other similar sightings; however, DPMO has made a conscious effort to discredit all of these reports--although from unrelated sources and too numerous to ignore.

Other Cuban Involvement

Several reports indicate that Cubans were piloting MIGs in aerial combat with American pilots over North Vietnam. One American advisor flying in an H-34 used a M-79 grenade launcher to shoot down a Cuban flying a biplane in Northern Laos.(28)

This was the same kind of plane used in the attack against Lima Site 85--the top-secret base in Laos providing guidance for American planes in the bombing of North Vietnam.

The involvement with American POWs was just a part of Cuba's long history of commitment to assist the Vietnamese communists, and just another chapter in their role as "communist internationales" on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Cubans first showed up in Vietnam not too many years after they consolidated power on their own island in the early 1960s. Soon after, the Cubans soon began operating en masse alongside their Vietnamese brethren. They even accompanied the North Vietnamese through the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace in Saigon on April 29, 1975.(21) However, the Cuban's assistance to the North Vietnamese continued well beyond 1975.

Raul Valdes Vivo: The creditation of Raul Valdes Vivo as a journalist, however, was only a cover, for he was in fact a DGI (Cuban Intelligence) officer and a high-ranking Cuban communist party member. [Latinos often hyphenate their last name in recognization of the matrilineal side of the family. Therefore, the last name of Raul Valdes Vivo (Valdes-Vivo), may in fact be Valdes. However, he will be referred to as Vivo in this paper.] In his book, El Gran Secreto: Cubanos en el Camino Ho Chi Minh, Vivo wrote that he first met Marta Rojas in 1965 at a Cuban Communist party meeting. Vivo was the Cuban communist party representative to the IndoChinese communist party from 1965 thru 1974.(21)

Vivo claims to have established a Cuban embassy in the jungle in Vietnam in South Viet Nam in 1969. The truth is Vivo was attached to the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the central command for North Vietnam's operations in South Vietnam, which was located well inside Cambodia. Much to the chagrin of the Vietnamese, Vivo was assigned to COSVN upon the insistency of Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who was head of the Cuban armed forces. The Vietnamese reluctantly acquiesced, since Cuba was supplying several thousand soldiers to build, maintain and guard a sizeable portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and providing a large amount of other "technical" and material assistance. COSVN was in fact a front for a front. [For propaganda purposes, the North Vietnamese maintained that COSVN was the headquarters for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), a political arm of the Viet Cong. However, in fact, the NLF was a "front" for Hanoi, and COSVN was entirely controlled by the North Vietnamese. It was the North Vietnamese headquarters for staging and directing operations into South Vietnam.]

During a reception in Cuba for a high-ranking Vietnamese communist party official, in a loud voice, Castro chided Vivo for not inviting him to "his embassy." In fact, Castro wasn't at all chiding Vivo, for the barb was aimed at the North Vietnamese for not inviting Castro to COSVN headquarters in Cambodia. Vivo responded by telling Castro the difficulty in accessing "his embassy" after Cambodian General Lon Nol's coup d'etat 1970, indicating that Castro's safety in Cambodia could not be assured. Vivo was evidently in charge of Cuban intelligence in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Initially, the soviet-block subversion of Cambodia was coordinated by the Cubans out of the Cuban embassy in Phnom Penh. After General Lon Nol took over in 1970, the intelligence staff of the Cuban Embassy in Phnom Penh was moved into Hanoi along with a core of Vietnamese trained high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials to form a "Cambodian government in exile." In another section of his book, Vivo refers to himself as the Cuban Ambassador "in" Hanoi in 1971.

Later in his book, Vivo says that Cubans were with the North Vietnamese communists in 1975 when they took over Saigon, "although a modest presence." These statements are very important, for historians have yet to admit the extent of the involvement of Cuba and the other Soviet-Bloc in the directing the Vietnam War as part of the "communist internationale."

Vietnamese in Cuba

While a POW in Hanoi, I was interrogated by "The Lump" and another individual who had a Spanish accent. After learning about the "Cuban Program" upon release, I assumed the person with the Spanish accent might have been "Fidel." After my release in 1973, I identified "The Lump" in a photograph taken in Cuba shown to me by a member of a Congressional committee. In the picture, "The Lump" was with a U.S. anti-war contingent. I was told that he had been identified by intelligence agents as being responsible for funneling KGB money to the American anti-war groups, such as those that Jane Fonda led.(9)

The foreign affairs element of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, code named "CP-72," was positioned only 90 miles off the coast of Florida during the war and their personnel worked closely with the Cuban Government in manipulating the anti-war movement in the United States. Many of the propaganda themes directed at influencing groups in the United States were developed from information gathered by "CP-72" and was fed to the Cuban interrogation experts who were involved in exploiting American POWS in Vietnam for propaganda.(29).

Also, CIA and DIA reports reveal the operation of an international communist youth training center southeast of Santiago de Cuba in the mid-and-late 1960s. The young people, many of whom were blacks and Vietnamese, were being trained for subversive operations against the United States. One intelligence source reported that many of these young people were children of French soldiers who had either defected to the Vietnamese communists during the French Indochina or were children of French forces who were POWs and still held by the Hanoi communists. Reportedly, they had been given Vietnamese wives, and the children were taken away from their parents at a very young age and sent to communist youth camps similar to those in the Soviet Union and "Hitler's Children" in Nazi Germany.(30)

According to a DIA source, their control officer was Jesus Jiminez Escobar. "The students (agents) were to be infiltrated into the United States through normal airlift channels and would be claimed by relatives on their arrival." "Their subversive activities against the United States would include sabotage in connection with race riots..."16 Another DIA source said that "the 5th contingent was infiltrated into the U.S. from Canada through Calais, Maine."17

The same source said that DIA also monitored a center in Cuba during the same period where Vietnamese were being trained by the Cubans in POW interrogation methods. "Fidel", "Chico", and the other Cubans associated with the "Cuban Program" in Hanoi in all likelihood may have been staff associated with this center. Maj. Fernando Vecino Alegret, "Chico", has an extensive background in youth movements. This presumption is strengthened by the debriefing reports of American POWs who were in the "Cuban Program." They reported that "a large number of VN officer trainees" came to the camp, and the Cubans "Conducted interrogation training, using [American] POWs."[DPMO] The trainees were estimated to be approximately 20 years of age. One would logically assume that this was in-service training of Vietnamese graduates from the training camp in Cuba.

Vietnamese and Soviet Bloc Research on American POWs

The Cubans used standard scientific methologies in selecting American POWs for the "Cuban Program;" i.e., random selection with a control group. Everett Alvarez was initially interviewed for the "Program" but was disqualified purportedly because he was of Spanish decent and presumed to speak Spanish.(5)

A 1975 secret CIA counterintelligence study states that the Medical Office of Hanoi's Ministry of Public Security (MPSMO) was responsible for "preparing studies and performing research on the most effective Soviet, French, communist Chinese and other...techniques..." of extracting information from POWs. The MPSMO "...supervised the use of torture and the use of drugs to induce [American] prisoners to cooperate." MPSMO's functions also "...included working with Soviet and Communist Chinese intelligence advisors who were qualified in the use of medical techniques for intelligence purposes. .... The Soviets and Chinese...were... interested in research studies on the reactions of American prisoners to various psychological and medical techniques..."(32)

The "Cuban Program" in Vietnam parallels that of a similar Soviet program in Korea according to congressional testimony on September 17, 1996 by General Jan Sejana, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet Block during the "Cold War."(33) After defecting, Sejana worked for years as a top-secret analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. According to Gen. Sejana,"Americans were used to test physiological and psychological endurance and various mind control drugs. Moscow ordered Czechoslovakia to build a hospital in North Korea for the experiments [on American POWs] there." As in North Korean, Soviet, East German, Czechoslovakian and Cuban "medical specialists" were assigned to the top-secret "Hospital 198" in Hanoi where American POWs were believed to have been taken for "treatment".(34) This would have been the hospital where at least one of the American POWs in the "Cuban Program" was taken for shock treatment.[35]

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Gen. Sejana had been in charge of communist Czechoslovakia's Defense Council Secretariat, and from 1964 on, First Secretary at the Ministry of Defense. In his various official capacities, he was constantly meeting with Soviet officials, receiving instructions, and relaying those instructions to various Czech agencies and departments. "At the beginning of the Korean War, we received directions from Moscow to build a military hospital in North Korea. ..... The Top Secret purpose of the hospital was to experiment on American and South Korean POWs. .... It was very important to the Soviet plans because they believed it was essential to understand the manner in which different drugs...affected different races and people who had been brought up differently; for example on better diets. .... Because America was the main enemy, American POWs were the most highly valued experimental subjects. .... I want to point out that the same things happened in Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War. The only difference is the operation in Vietnam was better planned and more American POWs were used, both in Vietnam and Laos and in the Soviet Union."

Several sets of remains of American servicemen repatriated from Vietnam evidenced that they were of POWs who had suffered severe and depraved conditions long after the purported release of all POWs in 1973. The skull of one had been sawn open, evidence of an autopsy as part of an experiment common to Soviet-style research on the affect of certain drugs on the brain.(36)

Cuba's End Game in Vietnam

According to a DIA "asset", after the signing of the cease-fire on January 21, 1973, 4,000 Cuban army engineers arrived in Hanoi. They helped rebuild the Phuc Yen/Da Phuc Airfield North of Hanoi where, according to intelligence reports, American POWs were used as technicians after the war. Later, the Cubans disappeared into the mountains of the north and constructed and eqvuipped secret bases about 100 km from the Chinese border between Monkai and Laokai. Here, the Soviets equipped the bases with mobile launch ramps, medium-range strategic missiles, possibly with tactical nuclear warheads, capable of hitting population centers in the southern part of China.(17) This is the same area where the above mentioned POW camp containing American prisoners "disappeared, guards and all."(25)

Units of this same Cuban engineering contingent were building the airfield in Grenada when Americans overran the island. U.S. military intelligence captured reams of documents and photographs relating to this unit's operations in Vietnam. However, no evidence has surfaced that these documents were ever analyzed for information on POWs by DPMO or any intelligence agency.

In the spirit of communist solidarity, Hanoi reciprocated for Cuba's assistance during the Vietnam war by sending U.S. arms and ammunition, captured in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to South America to fuel the "revolution" directed by the Cubans there.

As agents of the Soviets, and continuing their belief in the communist internationale, the Cuban government expanded its role in the communist internationale.

The Cubans sent troops to Angola. In 1975, Vivo again surfaces in Angola posing as a journalist. Vivo "interviewed" western mercenaries who were put on trail in a "kangaroo court" in yet another slanted propaganda coup against the U.S. One of the mercenaries was an American who's body has yet to be recovered.(13)

Evidently, Cuba's partnership with Vietnam in subversive activities against the U.S. has continued. In 1996, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that "Vietnam has been training Cuban Special Forces troops to undertake limited attacks in the USA... .... Havana's strategy in pursuing such training is to attack the staging and supply areas for U.S. forces preparing to invade Cuba. .... The training program is focused on seaborne and underwater operations, roughly comparable to those assigned to U.S. Navy Seals. .... The political objective would be to bring the reality of warfare to the American public and so exert domestic pressure on Washington."(37)

Vietnam and Cuba are closely linked by their belief in exporting international communism. Hanoi praised Cuba for its shootdown of two American planes and denounced the Helms-Burton Bill as "Insolent!" Hanoi recently reaffirmed the unswerving solidarity of the communist party, the government and people of Vietnam with the Cuban revolution.(38)

Conclusion

The behavior of "Fidel", "Chico" and "Pancho" in the torture and murder of Americans is beyond the pale and is clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War, which North Vietnam signed. Allowing these Cubans to go unpunished sets an ugly precedent, and adds to America's growing "paper tiger" image. Although the Cubans' crimes are smaller in number, they are no less than some of the war criminals that are being tried in Bosnia.

If the communist regime in Hanoi was fully cooperating in resolving the POW/MIA issue as President Clinton, Senator John McCain, and Ambassador Pete Peterson profess, the Vietnamese communists would have turned over to the U.S. the names of the Cubans who tortured and killed American POWs in the "Cuban Program." Full cooperation by the communist government in Hanoi includes the full disclosure of the true identities and roles of these Cuban "diplomats", who were "advisors" to the Hanoi prison system, and were directly responsible for the murder, torture, and severe disablement of American POWs.

Although the "Cuban Program" was reviewed by the Department of Defense's Prisoner of War and Missing in Action Office (DPMO), its analysis was incomplete. DPMO's chief analyst Robert Destatte's claims that the "Vietnamese's story is plausible and fully consistent with what DPMO knows about the conduct of the Cubans in question" are ludicrous and grossly incompetent. DPMO's analysis of the "Cuban Program" is glaringly incomplete, indicating either incompetence, negligence, or an attempt at political correctness in keeping with our present policy toward Cuba.

DPMO did not thoroughly, nor competently, analyze the documentation they presented to Congress, and other related material including:

-- POW debriefing reports containing the statements by the camp commander that the 'Cuban Program' "was a Hanoi University Psychological Study."

-- POW debriefing reportings that clearly state that the Vietnamese camp commander ("The Lump"), cadre and guards were well aware of, and often participated in, the torture.

-- the CIA report, North Viet-Nam: The Responsibilities of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam Intelligence and Security Services in the Exploitation of American Prisoners of War.

-- DIA reports on the training of Vietnamese prison interrogators by the Cubans.

-- no mention of the interviews and photographs made by Cuban journalists cited in documentation, and no there is no indication that it attempted to pursue the Cuban connection.

-- obtaining information from FBI files relating to the "Cuban Program," reports by Cuban refugees of American POWs from Vietnam being held in Cuba, or electronic and other surveillance of Eduardo Morjon Esteves during his "service" at the United Nations.

-- no attempt to obtain the intelligence information relating to their operations in Vietnam garnered from the seizure documents by Army intelligence from the Cuban engineers building the airfield in Granada during the U.S. incursion of that island.

End Notes

DPMO maintains, as did the defunct Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, that there is no conclusive evidence that American POWs were left behind in Vietnam after "Operation Homecoming" in March 1973. However, eyewitness reports, such as Col. Odell's, and numerous intelligence documents, belie these claims. Pentagon officials weren't the only ones who wanted to keep this secret, and it wasn't only because of third-country diplomatic ramifications. The Nixon Administration, and chief negotiator Henry Kissinger, in particular, wanted to hide the fact that POWs had been left behind in their haste to close the chapter on the Vietnam War.

There are numerous intelligence reports of a group of American POWs seen north of Hanoi, who were suffering from severe war wounds or mental disorders. They were still being held because the communists feared their release would have an unfavorable impact on public opinion. It is very likely that these POWs are the ones who simply disappeared at Monkai and Laokai, for conspicuously absent from the Operation Homecoming release in 1973 were POWs suffering from severe war wounds (amputees) and mental illnesses.

An abnormal, disproportionate number of Americans captured in Laos were never released. Although the CIA has acknowledged that approximately 600 men are missing in action in Laos, given the nature of the "Secret War," it is reasonable to presume that the number could be much higher. The fact that out of the 600 acknowledged missing in Laos, only 10 persons survived is unbelievable. Only 10 were released. When the North Vietnamese communists negotiated the treaty to end the IndoChina War with the French in 1954, they never acknowledged the capture of POWs in Laos. A 1969 RAND report warned that when the U.S. negotiated with the dogmatic Vietnamese communists, they would most likely again deny that they captured any American POWs in Laos. U.S. intelligence showed that over 82% of American losses in Laos were in areas under total control of the North Vietnamese.

American POWs captured in Laos were likely candidates for "transfer" to other Soviet Bloc countries, such as Cuba, since the Vietnamese considered them as "free commodities."

Much of DOD's analysis of POW camps and evaluations of live sighting reports are based on the time-frame that the camps were occupied by POWs who returned in 1973. Therefore, if a live sighting pertains to a period of time that does not correspond to the time it was occupied by returned POWs, it is most often disregarded or debunked. Also, the analysts often failed to take into consideration the fact that many of these camps were vast complexes with annexes often hundreds of kilometers apart that have the same name as the main camp. An excellent example is the Son Tay POW camps, one north of Hanoi and the other south of Hanoi. Thus, if a live sighting report correlates to the name of a camp but the coordinates are different from the main camp, the live sighting may be discounted. This is what happened in the case of most of the Thanh Tri complex and Ba Vi Prison live sighting reports.

DPMO analysts, and DOD's Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (which conducts on-the-ground investigation of live sighting reports in Vietnam), discredits most live sighting reports by providing the names of the sources to the Vietnamese communist secret services weeks before interviews--a violation of good intelligence procedures, who subsequently disappear or are coerced; or by simply discrediting the sources because they had been political prisoners. However, DPMO's Bob Destatte uses these same sources (political prisoners) to vilify "Bobby" Garwood, a detainee who was courtmartialed for collaboration with the Vietnamese communists and reported live sightings of Americans in Vietnam. If many of the reports are "triangulated," several live-sightings from unrelated sources are very similar--too much so to be mere coincidence (e.g., "white buffalos").

For some unfathomable reason, DOD sent pilots, who had worked in top-secret projects such as the atomic energy program, on tactical bombing missions over North Vietnam only to be shot down and captured. The loss of a great many planes over North Vietnam could have been easily avoided. According to National Security Council advisor William Stearman (1971-76 & 1981-93), "One of the untold scandals of the Vietnam War was the refusal of battleship foes [i.e., within the Pentagon] to follow an expert panel's advice and deploy them to Vietnam until it was too late. Of all the targets struck by air in North Vietnam, with a loss of 1,067 aircraft and air crews, 80 percent could have been taken out by a battleship's 16-inch guns without endangering American lives or aircraft."(39)

The loss of pilots was further exacerbated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Dr. Strangelove-like obsession of directing targets to be bombed at the same time every day. To some, it seemed as if DOD, led by McNamara, was intentionally aiding the communists by providing them with some of our best and brightest military minds [e.g., one F-111 pilot was shot down over North Vietnam shortly after leaving the Gemini space program.] Concurrently the Soviet equivalent to the Gemini program made quantum leaps over the next two years in the area of the F-111 pilot's specialty. An F-111 capsule was found in a Russian museum by U.S. investigators. There are several other similar examples of vast improvement in communist technologies after the capture of these pilots. According to DIA's "asset", the American POWs were "a gold mine of information to brief ... specialists in the technologies used by the enemy."

Michael D. Benge*

2300 Pimmit Drive, #604-W

Falls Church, VA 22043

Tel: (703) 698-8256 (H)

(202) 712-4043 (W)

October 4, 1999

___________________

*The author spent 11 years in Vietnam, over five years as a prisoner of war--1968-73, and is a diligent follower of the affairs of the region. While serving as a civilian Foreign Service Officer, he was captured in South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese, and held in numerous camps in South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam. He spent 27 months in solitary confinement and one year in a "black box." For efforts in rescuing several Americans before being captured, he received the Department of State's highest award for heroism and a second one for valor. He is an active Board Member of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America's Servicemen.

References Cited

1. United States Air Force. June 1975. Special Exploitation Program for SEASIA PWs, 1967-1968. Rep. No. A10-2, Series: 700/JP-1.

2. CIA Memorandum From: Deputy Director for Operations

For: Director, Defense Intelligence Agency. dated 28 Jan (illegible). Subj: Identification of "Fidel", Cuban Interrogator of U.S. Prisoners of War in North Vietnam.

35. Rochester, S.I. and F. Kiley. 1998. Honor Bound: The History of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973. Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington, DC. p.400.

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5

HAVANA TIMES — US Secretary of State John Kerry landed in Havana at nine in the morning and was welcomed at the Jose Marti airport by the vice-chief of protocol of Cuba’s foreign ministry, Lidia Margarita Gonzalez. Kerry will reopen the US embassy 54 years after Washington broke diplomatic, economic and commercial relations with the country, in addition to freezing Cuba’s funds at US banks and barring its citizens from traveling to the island....

06/20/96Cuban War Crimes Against American POWs During Vietnam WarMicheal Benge Ex-POW, 1968-1973Pentagon officials confirmed that POWs released during "Operation Homecoming" in 1973, were told not to talk about "third-country interrogations".

...

In spite of the Colonel's eyewitness account, and those of other returnees, DOD (Department of Defense) continues to this date to vehemently deny that any American POWs had been left behind.

For days in June 1968, Air Force Ace Major James Kasler was tortured by Fidel. Fidel beat Kasler across the buttocks with a large truck fan belt until "he tore my rear end to shreds".

For one three-day period, Kasler was beaten with the fan belt every hour from 6:am to 10:pm, and kept awake at night. "My mouth was so bruised that I could not open my teeth for five days."

After one beating, Kasler's buttocks, lower back and legs hung in shreds.The skin had been entirely whipped away and the area was a bluish, purplish, greenish mass of bloody raw meat.

According to Kasler, "at least 15 men were either killed during torture or were not accounted for." (Time, 4/9/71)

Three POWs were beaten senseless, and of the three, two disappeared and the other was reported to have died.

Fidel called one of the American POWs the "Faker". He was one of the three who had been beaten senseless.

The first time Jack Bomar saw him, the man could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe.

The man's head was down; he made to attempt to look at anyone. He had been through much more than the day's beatings.

His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed his wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins andthere were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back and legs.

Fidel smashed a fist into the man's face, driving him against the wall.

Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man'a face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. Again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man's face with the hose.

He was never released. (Hubble, P.O.W.)The Cuban torturers were given the names "Fidel" "Chico" and "Pancho" .

...

According to the Baltimore Sun (8/15/77), CIA analysts identified two Cuban military attaches, Eduardo Morjon Esteves and Luis Perez Jaen, who had backgrounds which seemed to correspond with information on Fidel and Chico, supplied by returning POWs.

A Spanish Cuban psychiatrist, Barral Fernando, interrogated Senator John McCain for an extensive period of time, part of which was published in the Havana newspaper "Granma". Recently declassified documents show that the CIA has photographs as well as composite drawings of the Cuban torturers.

After my return in 1973, I identified one of the Cubans in a photograph shown to me by a Congressional Committee.

I was told that one of the man's jobs was coordinating the American contingent of the Venceremos Brigade (cane cutters), and he was also responsible for funneling Soviet money to the Americans to support anti-war activities.

According to one news report, President Clinton's transition coordinator appointee, Johnnetta Cole, in 1976, "was active in the communist-front Venceremos Brigade".

Another report stated that U.S. prisoners-of-war captured in Vietnam were reported transferred to communist prisons in Cuba during later 1965 and throughout 1966.

One Cuban prisoner, who later escaped and fled to the U.S., was held in "Las Maristas, a secret Cuban prison run by Castro's G-2 Intelligence service, with American POWs captured in Vietnam".

The POWs referred to each other by rank, such as Lieutenant and Captain, and a guard told them that these Americans were war prisoners, mostly pilots, brought from North Vietnam.

Although he was interviewed by FBI agents upon his arrival in the U.S., they did not seem very interested in the story of American POWs from Vietnam. Nor was he ever debriefed by U.S. military intelligence or by the CIA.

Other Cuban witnesses have corroborated the fact that a substantial number of American prisoners were held in several Cuban prisons.

However, only one Cuban claimed knowledge that the Americans were POWs from Vietnam.

There is no evidence that the FBI, DoD, DIA or the CIA canvassed the Cuban exile community in Miami to find out if they had knowledge of American POWs taken from Vietnam to Cuba....

narrative about Lt. Col. Donald Odell’s first hours as a prisoner of war was featured in the Macomb Daily, May 21, 1973. The Macomb Daily archives. By Gina Joseph, The Macomb Daily

Posted: 09/13/16, 3:54 PM EDT | Updated: on 09/17/2016

The Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 154 will post an honor guard in honor of National POW/MIA Recognition Day at Resurrection Cemetery in Clinton Township, at 2 p.m., Sept. 16. At 6 p.m. VVA Chapter 154 will unveil a new memorial honoring Michigan’s Vietnam POWs and MIAs. Attending the event will be Lt. Col. Donald “Digger” Odell, a fighter pilot from Harrison Township shot down during the Vietnam War.

He remained a Prisoner of War for five a half years.

Shared here to illustrate what the first moments of his life was like as a POW are excerpts from a narrative that ran in the Macomb Daily on May 21, 1973. It was part of a five-part series on Odell, who received the Silver Star, Bronze Star Medal for Valor, Purple Heart and Air Force Commendation Medal among other awards and decorations.

Odell’s horrific day

Just before dusk on the evening of October 17, 1967, the day my F-105D fighter bomber was shot down as I flew my 17th bombing mission over North Vietnam, I stood before a large group of villagers, my hands tied tightly behind me, naked except for my shorts.

Already bruised and bleeding from beatings by the villagers who had surrounded me when I parachuted from my burning plane into a rice paddy, I had just been pulled from a thatched hut by four stocky militiamen who pointed their weapons toward a patch, which wound beyond the hut to a ribbon of dirt road.

I assumed this would be the point at which a vehicle would take me into Hanoi. I wondered if I would be taken to the famed Hoalo Prison (named the Hanoi Hilton by earlier prisoners of war). I also wondered at the absence of the villagers who had been clamoring at me all day. Yet, I saw no one except for the four militiamen. The silence after the hate-filled screaming of the crowd earlier in the day should have been a signal but I was too tired and sore to realize anything other than that I was being taken to a prison camp....

Then through half-closed eyes I saw a rather tall Vietnamese step out of the crowd directly in front of me. In his right hand he carried a hacksaw, somewhat rusted and bent. He reached forward and with his left hand grabbed the back of my head and forced me down in a bowed position. I felt something scraping and searing pain across my back and neck. As I struggled futilely in his grasp I twisted my head and saw his right arm pumping the saw across my back.

It’s at this point that the militiamen pushed the man off but he continued to attack Odell with his fists.

This excited the crowd who renewed their frenzy further. AT one point Odell managed to struggle to his feet but was kicked to the ground by the tall man with the saw.

Now the clubs, fists and spears were really working on me and, half conscious, I felt myself being dragged upright and pushed forward by the militia. For the first time I began to doubt that I would come out of this ordeal alive.

At that moment, the words to the song, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone,’ popped into my head. ...As it turned out there were to be many such tests ahead for me.

Logged

Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole ; He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. - Job 5